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Has nobody created a dating app that allows you to autistically file a 100 fields of highly-specific information and search against them?
Or have they just failed to get women to sign up? Or because the ones that signed up would only seek 7 feet tall high-earners with good hair? Perhaps the app would need to integrate the percentage of prospective matches generated by each successive restriction in the search box to counter that problem.
As stated by @orthoxerox, OkCupid was very close.
You answered a bunch of interesting questions, and you'd search for people who answered those questions in ways that indicated they would be compatible, then winnow from there.
There was a lengthy profile sections so people could put quite a bit of info about themselves if they wished.
And, the killer function, you could actually search and filter from the pool in a given area to zero in on ones that seemed most promising. It was more like spearfishing rather than sticking your bait out there and seeing who nibbled.
It was FAR from perfect in terms of actually generating dates, but I know multiple people who met spouses there.
I myself met the Ex that I almost married on there. Granted, it was because we both happened to be online at 2 a.m., me because I had gotten stood up by a different date. Timing/luck was a huge factor.
When I came back to it years later after my breakup, it had already been converted to a Tinder-style swipe app... as has EVERY OTHER APP.
I have a friend who is something of a player -- had casual sex in high school, was resented by a lot of women as a ladykiller, accused of infidelity repeatedly in ways that may or may not have been true. Even as an adult, when I really got to know him, he had a new girlfriend every 2-6 months. He had an engagement that broke off not too long after I got to know him.
He apparently had created an OkCupid or Match or one of the other traditional online dating websites after the engagement broke off, didn't use it much, didn't find much going on there, and his story is that when he went to log in after months of not using the site, he had one match, who was like a 95% match or whatever that platform used to gauge compatibility and had messaged him, he messaged her back. Apparently she was an English evangelical (there are such a thing, apparently) in the United States as part of a religious choir.
About a year ago they got married in a Church of England parish. I heard the wedding party's trip to the UK was great, although we're really more distant from each other in the past few years as our lives have drifted so I wasn't part of that.
My joke is that the best people you can meet on online dating are people who have just arrived (and are freshly looking and hopeful) or people who are just leaving (because they've realized the specific platform or OLD as a whole aren't getting them what they want). Online dating just seems to suck for people who use it to try to find partnership, and anyone who 'goes native' on them is probably not a dateable person.
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I used OKCupid during what was apparently it's heyday and I found it pretty good, certainly compared to stats I see thrown around now, which I am deeply immersed in as I am in the process if getting divorced (from someone I met on OKC). I got a reply from like 25% of the girls I messaged and once I had a reply my conversion rate of turning it into a date was like 75%. From what I can see people saying of the swiping apps that is several orders of magnitude better than present day (though the effort involved in finding good matches and generating good initial messages might have been higher, dunno). Once the divorce is final and I spend some time on the new apps I will report back and give my impression of the differences.
Be braced for misery my guy.
No point in sugar coating it. Just realize its not really a 'you' thing.
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OkCupid used to be like that, they even found what questions were the most useful for determining compatibility. Engagement farming killed that model. The most successful dating app is the one that keeps you swiping and paying for features.
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Duolicious (list of 2000 questions)
Way too many questions, and psychometrically incompetent. Couples mainly pair on intelligence and political ideology. Surprisingly, big 5 spousal correlations are quite small. They also pair on BMI and drug using status. Not 2000 dAnK mEmEs questions.
To clarify, Duolicious does not use your answers to these questions for pairing directly. Rather, it distills from these questions your positions on 47 personality traits, and uses those variables for pairing—but it also lets you filter by individual answers in the search interface. Full explanation
Are you the dev or something? 47 traits mostly pulled out of thin air does not change my psychometrically incompetent assessment.
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So this is what @faceh needs apparently ? @faceh please sign up and give us a report on the issues you immediately encounter on that app.
I think it'd be better to just find the correct environment, select whichever female specimen is the most liked / compatible, and deal with it until completion.
Personally, if I had to do it again, I would wager that a BLM protest would not be the right environment for me to find a match, perhaps I'd end up with some white-aspiring South-American or Asian.
Took me five minute to sign up and there are absolutely zero people meeting my criteria in a 30 miles radius.
That's unreasonably picky. Try increasing the radius. Also, don't forget to answer a bunch of the 2000 questions.
Remember that this website is rather small. As I understand it, the creator got a reasonable number of users by advertising on 4chan (there's still a dedicated thread on /soc/, though he no longer participates there) and Twitter something like a year ago, but you still can't expect to see a zillion people on it.
The 'nearest' prospect that showed up with the maximum range was across the state.
30 miles, for me, encompasses my town and the 3 nearest towns, any further than that and its a real commitment to drive out to meet someone.
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Because Dating Apps have perverse incentives. If a dating app is really good, it loses customers and since the goal of the app is to make money, losing customers leads to a bad revenue stream. Their goal is to show you matches that are close to what you want but that are incompatible, so that you feel like there is progress and then are willing to pay for upgrades to do better/be seen more/swipe more, etc. Realistically the only way to fix this would for a non-profit or for a government entity to create the "dating app" as they aren't required to be profitable and likely are more interested in the 2nd order effects of matchmaking/relationships.
The way to fix it would be with matchmakers who might charge a deposit but get their payout upon a successful-relationship-milestone. But society can't agree on what that milestone should be.
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They do have perverse incentives. However, in certain contexts it might be possible for them to be profitable even if they do not act on the perverse incentives. For example, medical professionals make money despite, generally speaking, not acting on the perverse incentives that would make them more profitable if they did a somewhat worse job of treating patients. Or am I wrong about this, and medical professionals actually do pursue these perverse incentives more often than I think they do? In any case, of course in medicine there is strong government regulation trying to prevent people from acting on the perverse incentives, whereas in dating apps there is not.
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Not true, a Marriage App generates its own new customers by working well. That's the point of marriage. There's certainly value in becoming The Marriage App That Works, which can be passed down through the generations, if only people want what it can offer. The limit is that silicon valley people don't want to offer it and a lot of Westerners don't want to buy what it would sell.
If it was so easy to create a company based on long term matching at scale, then where is it? Tinders been out for what 15 years, okcupid, match.com 30? 90% of datong apps/websites are owned by match.com
At some point you need to consider the systemic problems that incentivize dating app profitability. If matching people for long term profit made more money for shareholders then selling short term boost/matches then it’s likely we would see that sort of emergent behavior. It’s clearly not. The system is just not setup that way. Being known as “the app” only works if you have such network effects that you can get a large base of people so short term losses are offset by long term gains.
I believe the secret would be that payment is due at time of marriage. But that creates incentives which push the target market out of the mainstream.
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Was there ever a business willing to wait ~18 years for its returns?
Barrel-aged spirits are a classic example: scotches are not infrequently in that age range.
On the other hand, I've heard a lot of people in the business remark that it makes starting costs pretty overwhelming. At best you can start selling gin and vodka, or reselling out-of-house product while you wait for yours to age. Depending on jurisdiction you get to pay inventory/property tax on it too while you wait.
I once spoke to a guy who worked in a recently founded distillery. While waiting for their first batch of whiskey to age, they started selling gin and vodka just to get a bit of revenue in their coffers. To their surprise, their gin and vodka ended up being so popular (winning assorted international awards) that many of their customers are entirely unaware they distill whiskey.
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Yes and also children exist right now and approximately 0% of them are betrothed, so they will be looking for marriage sooner than in 18 years.
How am i, the app company getting paid? I’m not making an app out of the goodness of my heart. I need to achieve network effects, i need to market, i need people to not be afraid to say they met on my app so i can get credibility.
How does the shidduch system work, economically? Is the yenta doing it for free, or do both sexes pay up front, or is payment due at time of betrothal?
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Make men pay to be on it and focus on attracting women and matching well. The men provide the revenue, the good reputation provides the men.
Why would I a serious man pay for an app with no women on it, and why would i as a women waste my time joining an app with no men.
The entry barriers are already hard enough without first trying to filter at the very beginning.
If i am a man on the app, how am i paying? Subscription? Well the company now has an incentive to keep me on the app, if i match with someone i will leave and stop paying.
That's the initial hump, which is common to all social media. It has to be solved through seed funding.
If the company keeps you on the app, the app doesn't work and it loses its reputation. Tinder for example has no stock for people who want to get married.
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Tree farms
Fair. I'll specify: a business willing to wait 18 years for its returns in an area where returns aren't guaranteed and governed pretty much only by soil quality, rains and time; and also that area being social media???
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Software-wise, there are plenty of apps that are barely manned, generating zero revenue and somehow still exist. I think the main cost of dating apps is marketing, advertising on non-software platforms where you might find young women. It's the holy grail of advertising and it takes top-dollar to get it.
There's something counter-productive about women going on dating apps, as needing to jump through hoops, filing forms and boxes and so on is a signal that a woman is not attractive enough to just have a knight in shiny armor show up for her. So perhaps this is something that should be left to her parents. Perhaps already a thing in China. Otherwise with technology-minded millennials' children reaching adult age it should be. I know I'm concerned about my daughter's marriage prospects, so if I have to sign her up to an app to have access to a pool of relevant bachelors the world over, it might be worth it.
Otherwise another solution would be some kind of wife-hunting service, for this guy:
No need to have the women sign up for that, just identify them and let the customer actually do the effort of dating them. What's Palantir for?
There was a famous noughties fake website offering exactly that service. Large parts of the MSM were taken in and wrote outraged articles about how awful it was.
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Really, it's the same for a man. Attractive men (some combination of looks, personality, and social presence/status) don't need to put more than a cursory effort into getting women. They just show up to places and women make themselves available to them - maybe not every single time they go somewhere, but often enough that "meeting decent women who are willing to fuck" is a solved problem. Of course, meeting a woman that the attractive man would be willing to settle down with is a completely different issue.
So I think that if an attractive man is using a dating app, it's just for convenience.
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Would you pay 1k a year to give your daughter a better shot at marriage? Whats the upper limit you’d be willing to spend per year with a lump sum at the wedding? One really needs to think of the funding model of these companies they are VC invested short term companies where the goal is to hit a suitable critical mass of users and then ratchet the crank to turn a profit. And the barrier to entry is in the dirt. Their mercenary network of users is pretty much only the moat.
You've rediscovered Greek life. The entire point of sending your daughter to join a sorority is to make sure your son in law is wealthy and culturally compatible. They dress it up with dance routines and mansions to make it more appealing to eighteen year old girls, of course. But the SEC parents are the ones paying for it, not the girls.
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1k is nothing. If she gets married in her early twenties that's less than 10k.
Many people spend a lot more than that just on the wedding day.
Many parents spend a lot more than that every year keeping their kids in private schools where they can ensure their kids are around other 'good-enough' kids. Many parents spend a whole lot more than that sending their young adult women to college for the reward of them ending up childless girlbosses or worse.
Ideally the service should be able to vet out people with criminal pasts or tendencies, certain early-adulthood onset mental illnesses, scammers, etc.
If you want to get into a delivery-based system, it should go beyond the wedding. A husband who disappears, becomes a deadbeat, starts a second family, becomes a reddit moderator, etc, should not be considered 'success'. Perhaps some kind of life insurance model with a mafia/bounty-hunting component for retribution would work.
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In theory that's what keeper.ai is working towards.
Interesting site, but I’m not sure what the AI adds other than marketing gimmicks. Matchmaking algorithms are apparently good enough, okcupid was successful before match.com bought it and heavily monetized it into oblivion.
Yes, there legitimately should be no need for the 'matchmaker' role at all, if they let you search with the precision that I'd like.
Imagine if Google, instead of returning an array of results that are mostly responsive to your query, it showed you a snapshot of some webpage that sort of matches your general interests, and then makes you swipe through each one individually. A large enough database with a powerful enough search function shouldn't need a middleman I have to pay to find and access the result I want.
I think the appeal of Keeper is the promise of basically "one and done" being a real possibility rather than a whole process, so if you're really to in the mood for going through the process for months on end, they give you a shortcut.
I get the vision, but i think the average user is going to use it to search for the hottest member of the opposite sex they can find in their radius (lets be real it will almost always be men -> women) that meets some of their criteria. This just devolves into the pareto problem again. If you are a hot woman you are going to get spammed with messages. Theoretically a good matchmaking app acts as a filter by preventing you from needing to see all the spam and only connecting you to mates that it thinks are comparable.
That might be the sales pitch but is there any evidence of it? Thats essentially both OKC, Hinge, and hundreds of other matchmaking services pitch too.
Well yes and no.
If ALL you had to go on was physical appearance, then yeah you zero in on the pure 'hottest' and drop from there.
But OKCupid in its prime let you get granular and find someone who was 'hot' in the way you actually prefer, and would have enough preferences in common that you could actually expect a positive interaction.
And of course it let you identify various dealbreakers easily so you didn't waste time.
These days I basically can only snap judge someone based on whether they have a nose ring or they have aggressively liberal politics mentioned on their profile.
Nah I think that's the hilarious thing. The sales pitch of swipe apps is "we'll connect you with so many people! The possibilities are (theoretically) endless!" and they never explicitly promise those connections are likely to go anywhere.
The bait is the theoretical ability to find that perfect match amongst the detritus... whilst denying you the tools necessary to do so.
They avoid any, call it 'liability' for providing 'bad' matches because hey, you're the one swiping on these people, we're just putting them profile in front of you. But if it DOES work out somehow be sure to thank us because but for us that connection wouldn't have happened!
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Perhaps some kind of ranked competition system? Let the men have a way to express interest, then set them up in 1-on-1 or 1-on-many competitions. Could be actual physical fights, could be 'paperwork-filling competition' or even filling captchas, if the problem is simply that a given woman will get too much volume, forcing captcha would make it harder for male users to flood too many women at once. Perhaps have a setting for women to be able to pick the competition, or let the male users pick the competitions they want to engage in.
Lol if this existed it would make me regret being born a man even more, the sheer joy of being able to force all my suitors to compete in a tournament of Twilight Imperium 4E for my interest would be too fun.
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You could apply the filter to messages, too. Perhaps with "... and here's 99+ more that don't quite meet your filters" glimpse of what you can get if you compromise a bit.
Sounds like we are just reinventing pre-sale OG OkCupid. Which was great, so great they got bought and neutered.
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The AI adds apparently nothing because the app doesn't work due to the creators pairing people by hand. Why even be a website at that point?
Marketing probably, and giving me amusement. Gotta get on the AI grindset for VC funding.
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